The Direct Current - News from Rogers Power Electronics Solutions

Innovation Center Update

May 15, 2018

Rogers has made a conscious effort to update and refresh our R&D strategy over the past years. To help advance our strategic imperative of Innovation Leadership, Rogers opened the Innovation Center (IC) in Burlington, Massachusetts which is linked to the Northeastern University of Boston in February of 2014. Since then its mission has been to: 1) develop materials technology that will enable the next generation of growth in the Power, Protect, & Connect market space, and 2) validate our next generation of technical/commercial opportunities and feed them into Rogers’ business units for product development. The approach proved to be so effective that we opened the Asia Innovation Center (AIC) in Suzhou, China in January of 2015 and launched the European Innovation Center (EIC) in the spring of 2016. Our latest extension of the Rogers Innovation Center West (ICW) opened in the fall of 2017 in Chandler, Arizona. Our focus here is greater access to West Coast universities and technology centers and this IC is in close proximity to our Global Headquarters.

The global footprint of our Innovation Center enables Rogers to collaborate worldwide with leading universities to explore new product platforms and technologies. Typically, Innovation Center projects are run in very close partnership with our business unit R&D and Marketing teams to address future markets. One excellent example of such a partnership for PES is a project with Fraunhofer IZM in Berlin, which is one of the worldwide leading institutes for packing technologies. The European Innovation Center and PES R&D team collaborated to demonstrate a unique power module design based on SiC semiconductors and a new multi-layer substrate cooler product from Rogers (Fig. 11). The results of the project and demonstrator will be displayed at the PCIM Show 2018 in Nuremberg, Germany.